Chihuahua Desert Love Song

Dawn
Down by the river stands the little brown burro on haunches narrow
and trembling as a girl’s.

Morning
Although the river here is shallow enough to wade, men launch their
dented aluminum boats into the current, pole across with long staves.
For two dollars apiece they ferry travelers over and back, peeling
change from a roll of sweat-damp bills. We travelers stay dry, the
men make a living; this is a good arrangement. So the morning passes.

Midday
By noon the sun’s an anvil pressing down on my nape and the
bleached wall of the Sierra del Carmen stands out sharp as a theater
backdrop. Creosote’s oily yellow leaves radiate their sharp
smell, and the boke button’s single flower bares its bright
throat. Horse dung drying on the trail is grass and the earth where
grass grows. Nothing is wasted, nothing unclean. The desert is silent
as a sheet of paper; when you blink, I hear it, eyelids’ fluttering
kiss.

Afternoon
Across the road from a dead century plant, twenty-foot bloomstalk
bent on the ground, yellow leaves splayed like a dropped hand of
cards, a silversmith sits in the striped shade of an ocotillo-cane
ramada, wares spread on a draped table. Though I have no money,
he hands me a ring set with polished agate. “Mail me a check
when you get home,” he says. “There’s not enough
trust in the world.” Surprised, vaguely flattered, I slide
the ring on my finger; tilting the stone, I can just make out the
marks of the polisher’s wheel.

Sundown
When the wind kicks up, the pads of dead prickly pear clatter like
bones. Dark falling fast and hard, we walk to camp, passing beneath
the single telephone line. Invisible, the telephone wire hums with
talk, carrying conversation to the end of the line, where the river
marks the border. Above us, the stars slide coldly toward dawn.
That night I dream of needles pulled, red, from calf and palm, and
wake aching on cold ground.

Morning
Leaving, we find a bleached coyote skull, teeth brown from its last
kill. When I stumble, careless, the barbed end of a lechugilla rives
my shin, lodging close to the bone, a hard lump. I tape the salved
wound closed. Twelve days. When I pull the risen splinter, the wound
weeps water, unmixed with blood.

Afterward
Something says, you can make a place here, if you are careful. Others
have: witness the telephone line’s crackling current of talk,
battered boats scraping the river bank. Candelilla and yucca, hedgehog
cactus and dog-turd cholla; jackrabbit, roadrunner, Chihuahua raven;
the tiny-hooved, myopic javelina, foraging near the riverbed. Also
two tall cowboys in tight jeans and jingling spurs; I watch them
walk into the general store, their eyes hooded against the strong
sun. The sandstone hoodoos along Panther Gap Road change a little
every day, usually in ways too small to measure; wind gnaws deeper
in a curve, or grates a few grains of rock from the ridge; but once,
a ranger tells me, a pillar there one evening was gone the next
morning, a heap of boulders where it had stood. Wind working in
a rotten seam. That dust has drifted, now, into the pleated yucca,
settled in the part of someone’s hair, swirled downstream
where I can’t go. Desert mosaic of many-colored pebbles. Ribbed
barrel cactus swelling and shrinking in rain and drought. Look at
all I’ve smuggled out, splinter rooted under skin, silver
band circling my finger, silence hid beneath my tongue.

Joni Tevis is from Easley, South Carolina. “Chihuahua
Desert Love Song” is from her book-length manuscript of lyric
essays, The Wet Collection. She teaches creative writing
in Minneapolis. (3/2006)